


Breathe Infinity

by jusrecht



Series: Infinity [5]
Category: Code Geass
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-28
Updated: 2009-01-28
Packaged: 2018-02-11 11:01:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2065659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jusrecht/pseuds/jusrecht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Infinity-verse. The end of an era.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe Infinity

  
She had never felt quite like this, Eleanor reflected. She was always certain, firm, headstrong even, toward life and everyone who had helped shaping it with her. In occasions like this, as far as the memory allowed, there had always been someone – a guard, or maybe someone who was more important but evidently still less so compared to her and the position she held, even at eighteen – who would open the door and allow her entry.  
  
The guards now stood motionless, only silent statues guarding the door to His Majesty’s chamber. The maid who was following her, a tray balanced between her two hands, was glancing nervously at the guards, and then her lady. Eleanor decided, after another moment of hesitation, that she would risk it.  
  
She knocked, softly, and waited. Faintly she could hear the sound of music drifting out, classical piano, but there was no answer to her knocking. She wondered if he had fallen asleep – and the thought was both comforting and unsettling. He had withdrawn into his private chambers since noon, once the daily proceedings that took place every morning had been concluded. Everyone knew better than to ask questions, especially on this day.  
  
Eleanor realised that she would have to push the risk further. Taking a deep breath, she tried the door, and upon finding it unlocked, pushed it open gently, as slowly as her anxiousness allowed her.  
  
It was dark inside, only one lamp providing what meagre lighting it could for the entire spacious chamber. She signalled for the maid to wait outside and closed the door, her eyes scanning about the room. He was there, on the couch, sitting with his shoulders hunched, elbows propped on both knees, laced fingers pressed against his forehead. The song had lapsed to the next one, and this one, she noticed, was the same tune carved in her halls of memories – from summer every year, the one he used to play on a birthday, a foreign tune reminiscent of rippling water and singing cicadas in the swathe of summer breeze – and the recognition, as it caught up with her, momentarily stifled her determination.  
  
“Father?” she tried uncertainly after the moment had passed. He glanced up, but made no other reaction to acknowledge her presence. Her boots only made the faintest echoes on the thick carpet as she approached him, but she couldn’t shake away the feeling that she was disrupting the sanctity of the song. She gingerly seated herself next to him, but not too close, in case there was a barrier she couldn’t see but nevertheless existed.  
  
Above the fireplace, where a small fire was striving against stifling ashes to remain alive, was a painting of her mother. She was seated on a throne of red velvet, a queen, a mother she had only known briefly, and lost when her brother had been born. But the painting he was sitting across was of two men, a younger version of himself and of a knight who stood at his side.  
  
Suzaku had so often smiled, his green eyes beautiful and alight, Eleanor found herself remembering, but not in the picture. She had seen that expression on his face only a few times, the last two years ago on this day, when he had died – in a way, in the only way she knew he wanted to. A knight always died protecting his lord and master, and he hadn’t failed to fulfil this duty.  
  
And her father, tall, strong, majestic, in ways that she always hoped to learn how to achieve, for she would inherit his throne one day, had held his limp body with tears on his face.  
  
“He wouldn’t want to see you like this,” Eleanor heard herself saying, her voice almost lighter than the music trails. The words rang hollow in her ears, replica of lines she had read in books where death was just five letters strung together into a word. She prepared herself for many things, from the bad to worse, but he only looked at her and smiled, in a way that she never knew he could.  
  
And that was when she put her arms around him, wishing that she had done this long, long time ago. Suzaku would have, if he were still here.  
  
“It’s just there are too many regrets,” he said, his echoing, staid voice muffled by her right shoulder. “Things I have never said.”  
  
Eleanor closed her eyes, willing the tears not to fall. She felt like she should say something, but words continued to elude her, as wisdom always did. Suzaku would have known what to say, she found herself thinking, _wishing_ , and regretted the time she had not spent with her father, in all those years – if only to know him better, without the wall his title had erected between them. Now, the shoes were much too big for her to fill, even if just a portion of it.  
  
But maybe no one could. She doubted, as she had now and again, that even her mother had ever filled that space. The jumbled feeling it brought was a curious mix of hurt, disappointment, and very little but fierce pride. She loved him after all – oh how much she did, still – and she was proud of the love he had so staunchly born for her father.  
  
And so a daughter, the princess, did the only thing she could for her father, the emperor.  
  
She held him, and he allowed her.  
  
 ** _  
_**End  
  



End file.
